At the Spring Fair I got cornered by a chap building sites.
So I asked how long will it take to get onto the first page of Google/Yahoo etc?
His response -about six months.Is this correct?
The big issues with link building are:
1. Is the site more than 12-18 months old?
2. How competitive are the keywords?
Older sites can get faster results and really target competitive keywords - sites less than 12-18 months old can be profitable when link building for the Longtail, but are unlikely to hit the high traffic competitive keywords.
6 months is a *very* reasonable minimum time to run a link building campaign - I ensure this on all of my contracts, for the simple fact that when developing good links, the results improve continually through the 6 months period.
Sure, a good campaign can push you from Top 100 to Top 10 within a couple of weeks, but over the following months, all things being good, it slowly rises further.
However, with fresh link scoring and link aging factors taken into account, this can still leave targeted keyword rankings unstable, especially in the first few months.
At the end of 6 months, if no new work is done, you've probably reached a plateau where you can then re-evaluate the campaign, the keywords, and see what changes you'd like to make.
Ultimately *good* link building takes time for the real impact to filter through and the rankings be properly managed.